Everyday Life

There is no new news or exciting goings on for the Sweigarts right now...but I thought that I would write anyway just to record what we've been up to.

I was having a conversation with friends today about how the older you get, the moments slip away quicker. I can't believe that we are approaching August! It has been an amazingly fast paced year and I can't imagine that our life could ever pick up speed any more than it already has. Anyway, I've begun to try to make every day matter in some little way. Its hard because I often just drift through my life, living for the weekends, and the time just passes too quickly. I actually have to make myself stop and soak things in to really appreciate the daily life that I am leading.

Here are some recent moments...

1. Last night a little kitten (small, orange, and adorable) walked across the street and into my yard and started purring and rubbing itself against my leg. I'm not much of a cat lover, but this cat was adorable. I spent about a half hour in my front yard petting this sweet cat and it was fun soaking in some of the summer evening smells and sounds.

2. CJ and I have been working nonstop or so it seems. We're still trying to wrap up the Checkabiz project, so much of our extra time and energy is getting devoted to this project. Or we spend time procrastinating and worrying about this project. Tonight we took a much needed break away from the work and relaxed.

3. Saturday we went out to the Meridian house (still for sale) to mow its lawn and I noticed that it was 90 degrees inside. The AC unit had completely given out on us. So I called, scheduled an appointment, and this morning around 7am I was sitting at the house waiting for a repair guy. It took him about a half hour to show up, so I used the time to sleep in my old house on the floor. It was a GREAT nap and I love how that house, while empty, still has the familiar smell of home.

4. Work is going great for me, not so great for CJ. CJ is working on a frustrating project right now which is causing quite a bit of stress. Mostly he is having installation/computer troubles at work. I'm really hoping that will turn around soon for him.

5. CJ has been watering and caring for my plants and I think it is so sweet. Ever since the deer incident, I've given up on my garden. But CJ is keeping that thing alive for me. Today I picked a bunch of little ripe tomatoes. I ate a few and they were so yummy.

6. Bachelor is a dork! That little dog has been really trying my patience lately...which means that he needs to get out for some exercise. As I am writing this, he is wildly chasing his tail and bumping into things. If I stop being annoyed for a second and watch him, its actually quite amusing.

7. We saw the Simpsons movie over the weekend. It was definitely NOT worth the $12 we spent and was a giant disappointment...but it is still always fun to get away for a movie. One of the great things about our relationship is that we have date nights/days ALL of the time :) It is fun even when we see a stinker movie because we act like movie critics on the way home.

8. I'm still LOVING our new house. Its got some old quirks...like the toilet downstairs still needs to be fixed (if I stop procrastinating calling the plumber) but I love it. We're feeling very comfortable and settled in the new place.

Coolest Place To Work Ever II

Ok seriously....this is the coolest place to work ever! The technical services manager (our boss) setup a streaming movie so that we could all watch a movie on Friday afternoon at our computers. Today we watched Mystery Science Theater 3000- Mitchell. It is hilarious and so much fun to watch. We LOVE working here! So while I was getting some work done on one monitor, this movie was playing on the other. There was popped popcorn and we had a blast.

Ciege the Chef

All day yesterday I was feeling sick. I don't know if its the heat or the recent lack of sleep, but I had no energy and was in quite the complaining mood. Ciege was really good to try all day to cheer me up and kept trying into the evening.

Last night on the way home from work I talked about how much I LOVE oriental food. Almost immediately after that conversation, Ciege took a detour to Walmart. We needed to pick up some milk & eggs and stuff. Ciege told me that he was going to make dinner for me. I was excited because it is rare treat since I am usually the cook in the family, but I was expecting his "grilled cheese & chili" specialty. He was quite secretive at Walmart and tried to hide the ingredients that he bought.

About an hour later at home I was enjoying homemade pork fried rice and sweet and sour chicken. It was amazing! He is so cute. He's never made that dish before, but is quite creative in the kitchen. He baked some chicken nuggets and then covered them with a sweet and sour/pineapple sauce that he made. He fried an egg, cooked some rice, and cut little slices of ham lunch meat which he had fried. I know...doesn't sound very good...but it was amazing!

I had a huge grin on my face the entire time I was enjoying it. I think what impressed me the most was that he was really listening to me and he jumped at the chance to do something to cheer up my day. We rushed upstairs with our yummy dinner and enjoyed an episode of 'Smallville'. We had an awesome evening together and today I'm still smiling! We wrapped up the evening by sharing some of our favorite new songs together. What a sweet guy to whip up such a great dinner for me on a night when I was most definitely not feeling up for cooking.

Biggest Flower Ever!

This flower just bloomed in our front yard and it is HUGE! CJ showed it to me last night and I could barely believe my eyes. This isn't a closeup....this is just a GIGANTIC flower.

Don't believe me?

Check out my hand next to it...

I have no idea what type of flower this is and I have never seen anything like it. Maybe someone out there could tell me what this huge flower is :)

On another note, we're having a great week. It is nice to have my Ciege home again and we're enjoying each other's company. Today we went to the gym at lunch and tonight we're headed out to the old house to mow its lawn. Yep, the old house is STILL for sale. We've had it on the market for nearly 90 days now. The housing market has really slowed with recent Micron layoffs and we're just really hoping that it will sell soon. While it is still out there it is a little worry that we have in the back of our minds. And seriously, its a pain to go out there every week to mow the lawn. Each time we go out there we obsess about what we could do to get it sold quicker. :)

Tawnya's 30th Birthday

Last Saturday I attended Tawnya's 30th birthday dinner. Tawnya is a childhood friend of CJ. He really wished that he was able to make it, but he was celebrating his 30th in Vegas. Her dinner party was great! It was held at her friend Amy's house and it was a lot of fun. Tawnya is a really fun person to be around. She has a lot of warmth and it was really nice getting to spend some more time with her.

Vegas Baby

CJ and Sean celebrated CJ's 30th birthday in Las Vegas. They stayed at the Luxor hotel (picture above) and had a great time. From the sound of the updates, they were up by more than $400 total at one point in the trip! But I've heard since that they ended up giving those winnings back later in the trip. Earlier this morning, they missed their flight to come home, so they are going to spend the rest of the day in Vegas and make a late flight out tonight. I can't wait to hear all of the details of their trip.

While the boy's away...

The girls will play!


We had a great night of scrapbooking until 4am! It was so much fun and we got lots of chatting and a little bit of scrapping done.

CJ's 30th Birthday Send Off

For CJ's 30th birthday, he decided to take his best friend Sean to Las Vegas for a gambling weekend. So I organized a surprise send-off at his favorite "Taco Time" before his flight. It was so hard to keep it a secret...and in the end I had to tell him because he had planned on hitting the gym before his trip and wouldn't accept any of my pleas to go out to dinner :) His friends from work (and his old work) and family ended up coming to help him celebrate. It was a lot of fun and he ended up getting a lot of fun gifts. He got tons of cash, a fun money clip, a really cool box that was full of dollar bills that you pulled out of the top one by one, a great little office dart board, a Smashing Pumpkins CD, a weed wacker, a "That's How I Roll" tshirt, and a "You're So Money" tshirt.

Here are some pictures of the sendoff...

Our New Address

I realized that I haven't updated family and friends on our new address. Here it is...

3674 N. Stone Creek Way
Boise, ID 83703

Cooling off

Have you ever seen a grown man playing in the fountains? Well, it was so hot that CJ decided to run through this fountain today at lunch.
Luckily I had my camera in my purse ready to go...

Frustration

It is SO frustrating sometimes to work with a computer! Have you ever been there? Ugh! We spent the entire weekend working on a very quirky software defect. The problem is that we're desperately trying to wrap up our part-time programming project and this defect had to happen at the worst time possible. One of the most frustrating things about our job is that there is really no one to go to when we're stumped. When Craig and I both can't figure something out, there is no one we can escalate our problem to...we are on our own. And we're super frustrated.

At work, Craig is having to reinstall his entire computer environment because of a bug. This is a huge ordeal because a software developer has tons of time intensive software and environments on their computer. So there are issues he needs to fix and resolve but he can't get to them until he fusses with his work computer...very frustrating.

And I think because of all of this dumb computer frustration, we're in a bad funk lately. We're arguing a lot and taking our frustrations out on each other. It's nothing really serious...we're just really out of sync for the past week or so. Also, very frustrating. Its getting the point where I am just frustrated that we're so frustrated!

So last night, we took a break from the computer (or else it was going to get kicked like in the picture) and we got out some of our aggression at Star Wars (Xbox game). It was great and a really good rest.

You know you've had a bad week when you are actually looking forward to a Monday :) It's good though to be on a new week and have a fresh start. Hopefully we'll have a much better and more productive week.

Do Over

We want a do over of today. Nothing about today was worth getting up for. Work was mediocre, it was super hot outside, and it felt all day like we had a bad case of the Tuesdays.

Today we decided that we need to lower the price on our home since it has now been 60 days and no offers. So we were stressing about strategy and how to do that appropriately. There are layoffs at Micron, which THANKFULLY doesn't directly affect us anymore because Craig doesn't work there now, but we're worried about what 1000+ jobs lost in the area is going to do to the housing market.

We have a toilet that flooded, so we are thinking that we need to call a plumber.

One of our sprinkler zones is not working properly, so we have to manually turn it on. This morning we turned it on and left for work, forgetting to turn it off. So this evening we came home to a flooded out basement...water everywhere! Thank goodness CJ & I bought 50 towels when we first got married because we have used every single one to sop up the soggy carpet. (towel story for another day)

I picked up what I thought was a leaf on our carpet and ended up being a slimey slug (EWEWEWEWE!)

After spending the better part of the evening on 'disaster cleanup', I went to the fridge to get a soda. Last week we stocked our mini fridge on the back porch with tons of sodas. Well something went horribly wrong with either too hot heat or too cold fridge because one of my precious Diet Dr. Bolds (Generic Dr. Pepper) had a giant explosion and all of our pops are bloated and there is a giant mess. I think I'll clean that up tomorrow.

Seriously...what next? There are at least 30 minutes left in this day and I hope that nothing else explodes or floods before I get to bed. Oh and I will probably have a strange nightmare about a slug tonight.

Happy Tuesday!

4th of July Celebration

This year for the 4th of July, close family friends Russ & Gwen were in town from Seattle. So we had a backyard bbq with lots of yummy food. Our friends Sean & Kendra and their family came over as well. It was SO darn hot, even in our shady backyard, but a lot of fun.

Here are some pictures...

Date Night

Tonight CJ and I attended a Stephen Stills concert. (Crosby, Stills & Nash) We loved it and had a really great time. The crowd was most definitely 20-30 years our senior and it was really neat to see a group of people from an older generation enjoying music of their yesteryear. I really wasn't expecting much out of this concert because I figured that this guy would be pretty washed up by now, but I was impressed. This guy can still rock. And let me tell you, those 50+ year olds can really rock too! The fans were definitely getting down a little more than I am used to seeing and it was so cute. We're so lucky to have VIP access to the Big Easy by working at Wirestone. We're able to sample some bands that we normally wouldn't shell out the $30 to go see. And for me, tonight was like sampling a bit of the past. Also, we got to spend some time chatting with the Wirestone CEO who is a really great guy. Toward the end of the concert, we sat on a couch in the VIP lounge reminiscing about our own childhoods and enjoying the atmosphere. It was a great end to a great Monday.

Garage is finally clean

Ta Da! The garage is FINALLY clean. After a long weekend of working on it and gardening, I now have an organized garage instead of the trash heap I used to have. It feels so good to have this task off of my to do list. Now if only I had another day that I could rest from all of this hard work around the house!

My Meltdown

Today I had a 'meltdown' as CJ called it. It's really kind of funny now that I look back on it. For the past few weeks, I've been taking super good care of my garden, getting really excited because I had tons of tomatoes and vege's that were starting to sprout up. I've spent hours in this garden pulling weeds, fertilizing the ground, and caring for these fun plants. This is my first garden ever and I determined that it would be a great success.

My sweet neighbor 'Elmer' asked me when I moved in if I would be planting a vegetable garden and explained how much he loved the old neighbor lady and how she shared her fresh vegetables with him. That is what inspired me to create this garden, and until this morning...this garden has brought me a lot of joy.

Ok, so now comes the meltdown part...I came out this morning and I found that some creature had devoured almost ALL of my tomatoes! And the tops of all of my plants were eaten. And my squash...consumed. I looked around and saw that this creature had knocked down and trampled on my beloved little garden and then spit out my prized biggest tomato after it was full. I was SO sad. I can't really explain why this made me so sad...but I was having a moment. And then my sweet husband came out. I started to tell him what happened and like a little girl, I was sobbing about how some jerky animal had made a mockery out of my garden. He was so kind and sweet to me and hugged me as I had my emotional moment. Later he came back and noticed that I was in the hot sun pulling weeds and still sad about what had happened, so he called his Mom and had his family come over and help me weed :) They really did give me the pick me up that I needed and we got SO much accomplished. I can't say it enough, I have the greatest guy ever and he is so sensitive to my needs. It was perfect that he called his family over to cheer me up and they were so great to come over with tons of gardening tools and lots of energy. My meltdown turned into a great afternoon and a yummy trip to 'Fanci Freez' for some yummy dipped cones afterwards.

P.S. The 'creature' was a deer! We found lots of little hoove prints in the garden.

Happy Birthday Nona!

Nona's birthday was on Friday, so we took her to dinner at the Lucky 13, which is a yummy pizza place downtown. We love the atmosphere because it is a patio setting and lots of people bring their dogs. We had a blast chatting and meeting other peoples furry animals. The weather was super hot at first, but cooled down enough for us to enjoy our dinner outside. We had a really great time and then came home for some fried ice cream. Here are some shots I took of our evening...